DC

Sorry, I didn't put it very clearly. Yes, I know that if someone has access to the machine they can do what you say (in fact, I did it myself to one of my hard drives after a catastrophic double crash — and come to think of it, it wasn’t that simple, since you had to know how to set permissions) — what I actually meant was that most of the people you need to worry about getting unwanted access to your machine don’t have a sufficient level of knowledge to do that. For them, having a password restriction is a good safety measure.

There was the case of the guy whose laptop was stolen on the Tube. The gits who stole it clearly were stymied by the fact that it didn’t boot Windows, and then demanded a password. They left it on the Tube in disgust and he got it back, intact and with his data secure.

It used to be the case that you just couldn’t install Linux in such a way that it could boot without having to enter a login and password. I don’t know which distro had the bright idea of allowing direct boot into a user session, but I think it is foolish. I suppose we should be grateful for the small mercy that those distros which put up a menu of users on the login screen don’t include root there.

Actually, the switching between different sessions isn’t beyond the install-and-forget thing. It’s sitting there in the KDE menu, and a helpful dialogue comes up to tell you what’s going on if you don’t already know.

I am not only impressed at how effortless these new distros are, I am actually surprised.